Jon Voight said those very words to him when he co-starred with the Oscar winning actor in “Varsity Blues,” a football drama Van Der Beek made at the height of his “Dawson’s Creek” fame. He wasn’t as famous as Bieber of course, but one mob of teenage girls is just as good as another and Van Der Beek, now 37, didn’t know how to handle it.

“It freaked me out,” he says. “I remember signing my first autograph and hardly being recognized and two weeks later, making an appearance in Seattle, and [the promoters] said they were expecting 200 people. I said, ‘No way are 200 people coming.’ More than double that showed up. Screaming girls. Barricades. They shoved me into a car to get out of there. I am proud to say it was the first time I’d ever been shoved into the back of a cop car. I realized very quickly that this was something I had zero control over.”

James Van Der Beek as Will.Photo: CBS

Let’s not get too melodramatic. Van Der Beek was 20 when he was cast as 15-year-old Dawson Leery and “making enough money to pay off college in one year.” In makeup they had to lighten his dark brown eyebrows to make him look younger. In his audition he pitched his voice higher so he would appear younger. The camouflage worked. Van Der Beek and his costars, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams, were overnight stars.

After the show ended in 2003, Van Der Beek had a hard time persuading directors to see him as an adult. “I wasn’t getting cast because I didn’t look old enough. Quite honestly, I think I needed to grow up and people needed me to go away for a while,” he says.

The all-grown-up Van Der Beek is starring in a new CBS sitcom “Friends With Better Lives.” He plays Will, a divorced man whose re-entry into the dating pool is a comic disaster. “Will hasn’t asked a girl out since the invention of the text message,” he says. “A girl sends him a sext picture and his friends say, ‘You can’t respond in kind. You’re not that guy,’ and Will says, ‘Who says I’m not that guy?’ We don’t know who I am as a single dating person. And we quickly find out why he is not that person.

“The show is about everyone looking at everyone else, saying the grass is always greener, but I’m very happy with my own yard,” he says.

There are four people in Van Der Beek’s yard. His family includes his wife Kimberly and their three children, all under the age of four — Olivia, Joshua and Annabel, who is a newborn and was born at home like her brother. “It went very quickly,” he says of Annabel’s arrival, a water birth. “I was reading a story to my three-and-a-half year old while my wife was giving birth down the hall.”

Van Der Beek met his wife while on a Kabbalah-sponsored trip to Israel. Raised Protestant in Cheshire, Conn., he had been studying the quasi-religion for a number of years when he told a friend he was “tired of being single. I wanted to settle down and have a real life. And in the middle of telling him that, somebody interrupted me. It was Kimberly.”

Life after “Dawson’s Creek” has meant different things for each of its stars and fame hasn’t always been kind.

For Holmes, there was the middling film career and her notorious marriage to Tom Cruise, which ended in divorce. For Jackson, it’s been a handful of TV shows such as “Fringe.” Despite the scandalous death of her late partner Heath Ledger, Williams has led the most charmed life of them all — three Oscar nominations and the starring role in the new Broadway revival of “Cabaret.” Van Der Beek says she was always the one who had the greatest promise.

“Michelle was always incredibly smart,” he says. “I always joked that we’d all be asking Michelle for a job. I thought she would produce, she would write.”

“She was always a deep thinker, way beyond her years,” he says. “She was the youngest of us, age-wise, and the oldest in every other way.”